The Campaign for Haas

Ask the Donors

From Engineering to Aida—Mixing Business with Romance

Cheryl and Christian Valentine, both
MBA 91, came from engineering backgrounds to
study finance at Berkeley-Haas and went on to work in
project finance for Bechtel after graduation. In 2000,
Christian started his own investment
company, Walnut Capital, in
their hometown of Walnut Creek.
Cheryl serves as a trustee for
the UC Berkeley Foundation.
They have been generous
donors to Berkeley. Cheryl
and her father endowed
a chair in the College of
Engineering, and now,
through a gift to the
Campaign for Haas,
she and Christian have
established a chair at
Haas in management
of technology.

Q: Why did you decide to
earn MBAs and choose
Berkeley-Haas?

Cheryl: I went to UC Berkeley
as an undergrad in the College
of Engineering. I worked for
Allied Chemical, which later
became General Chemical,
out in Pittsburg, California.
The company was going
through a lot of management
changes and restructuring, so
that sparked my curiosity in an
MBA. I was on the board of the
Engineering Alumni Society at
the time, so I was meeting with
the dean, and I thought it would be
a good idea [to return to Berkeley].

Christian: I grew up in the
shadow of Stanford, where I
went as an undergraduate. I
received degrees in electrical
engineering and in history.
I then worked for four years
in Silicon Valley for Sierra
Semiconductor. I was managing
computer networks. At
that point in time I realized that I'd gone
about as far as I could and decided to return to school to get an MBA. I wanted to stay in the
Bay Area, and because of my past involvement with technology,
I wanted to go to a school that had a focus and
strength in that area.

Q: How did your paths cross in school?

Cheryl: There were a number of core classes that
the first-year MBAs took, and we were in those classes
together. I joke because he had season tickets to the opera,
and there were five performances over the school year. He
took a different girl to each one. I was Aida. We took BART
because it was after the earthquake, and there was no way
to get across the Bay Bridge. It was very romantic.

Q: What role has your Berkeley education played
in your career?

Cheryl: It taught me how to think, how to analyze a lot of
information, to find the problem, and formulate solutions.
My project engineering was all about that, and it wasn't
really any different when I went into project finance and
development.

Christian: It's a set of tools and ways of evaluating situations
that's slightly different than what you get in engineering.
As engineers, we both approach things from an
engineering mindset, and there are certain tools within
business analysis that are different from that. Those are
the areas where we arguably were thinner before going to
business school.

Q: Which of the Haas Defining Principles do you feel
strongest about?

Cheryl: Question the status quo. Berkeley is starting to
do that as a campus in a big way. They're starting to look
at issues that corporate America has looked at for a very
long time. They're doing that in response to the budget
cuts, but I would argue that they should be doing that in
any event because they have world-class faculty, they have
world-class students—they need a world-class operation to
support the campus.

Christian: We have three teenagers. Questioning
authority is what they're all about!

Q: Your gift to the Haas School supports an endowed
chair. What inspired you to make that gift?

Cheryl: I have been quite involved with UC through the
Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Engineering Alumni Society,
and the UC Berkeley Foundation. My father is also a mechanical
engineer from Berkeley, so my father and I created a distinguished
professorship in mechanical engineering.

Christian: Here at Haas, Sara Beckman's class got us
focused toward supporting management of technology
because we're both engineers and it's the techier side of
the business school. Plus, we thought it would be nice if
we could do something together for the business school
because that's where we met. –Carinne Johnson